Ol Onal


The Ol Onal, also known as also known as Bhumij Lipi or Bhumij Onal, is an alphabetic writing system for the Bhumij language. Ol Onal script was created between 1981 and 1992 by Ol Guru Mahendra Nath Sardar. Ol Onal script is used to write the Bhumij language in some parts of West Bengal, Jharkhand, Orissa, and Assam.

Language

Bhumij is a language of the North Munda group of the Austroasiatic languages, spoken mainly in the Indian states of Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal. It is spoken by around 100,000 people in India. The language is closely related to Mundari, Ho, and Santali.

History

The Bhumij community had no written language, and knowledge was transmitted orally from one generation to another. Later researchers started to use Devanagari, Bengali, and Odia scripts to document the Bhumij language. However, Bhumijs did not have their own script.
The Ol Onal script was created in between 1981 and 1992 by Mahendra Nath Sardar for writing Bhumij in India. It was initially designed by Sardar as a bicameral script, where the lowercase letters were known as Galang Onal, however only the capital letters called Ol Onal have been used for teaching and printed books. Sardar wrote many text books in the script, but there's no known record of Sardar's Galang Onal lowercase letters ever being used in publications, except in the script author's personal design manuscripts, with various tried variants that Sardar did not promote for wide use in the Bhumij community.

Structure

Ol Onal is written from left to right and behaves as a regular alphabet, and not like the typical abugidas used for other Indic scripts: the 6 basic vowels and 24 basic consonants are simply written as standalone letters, and the consonants do not have any inherent vowel. So there's no vowel killer and no need to form complex clusters or to contextually change the letter forms in ligatures for initial or grouped vowels, and final or grouped consonants..
There are three additional signs : the nasalisation sign mu, the lengthening sign ikir, and hoddond.
The script also includes ten decimal digits, and an additional abbreviation sign.

Unicode

Ol Onal was added to the Unicode Standard in September, 2024 with the release of version 16.0.
The Unicode block for Ol Onal is U+1E5D0–U+1E5FF: